Monthly Archives: September 2015

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

Clusters are the scale-out way to go in today’s data center. Why not try to architect an infrastructure that can grow linearly in capacity and/or performance? Well, one problem is that operations can get quite complex especially when you start mixing workloads and tenants on the same cluster. In vanilla big data solutions everyone can compete, and not always fairly, for the same resources. This is a growing problem in production environments where big data apps are starting to underpin key business-impacting processes.

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

This might be controversial, but 5-9’s of availability just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore in today’s cloudy, more hyperscale, consolidated data center storage infrastructure. In fact, we deserve much better. Infinidat is claiming to deliver 7-9’s, and do it at scale and performance and at a highly competitive scale-out cost.

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchStorage.

Whether driven by direct competition or internal business pressure, CIOs, CDOs and even CEOs today are looking to squeeze more value, more insight and more intelligence out of their data. They no longer can afford to archive, ignore or throw away data if it can be turned into a valuable asset. At face value, it might seem like a no-brainer — “we just need to analyze all that data to mine its value.” But, as you know, keeping any data, much less big data, has a definite cost. Processing larger amounts of data at scale is challenging, and hosting all that data on primary storage hasn’t always been feasible.

Historically, unless data had some corporate value — possibly as a history trail for compliance, a source of strategic insight or intelligence that can optimize operational processes — it was tough to justify keeping it. Today, thanks in large part to big data analytics applications, that thinking is changing. All of that bulky low-level bigger data has little immediate value, but there might be great future potential someday, so you want to keep it — once it’s gone, you lose any downstream opportunity.

To extract value from all that data, however, IT must not only store increasingly large volumes of data, but also architect systems that can process and analyze it in multiple ways.

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchDataCenter.

We are always driven to try to do smarter things faster. It’s human nature. In our data centers, we layer machine learning algorithms over big and fast data streams to create that special competitive business edge (or greater social benefit!).

Yet for all its processing power, performance and capacity, today’s digital-based computing and storage can’t compare to what goes on inside each of our very own, very analog brains, which vastly outstrip digital architectures by six, seven or even eight orders of magnitude. If we want to compute at biological scales and speeds, we must take advantage of new forms of hardware that transcend the strictly digital.

Many applications of machine learning are based on examining data’s inherent patterns and behavior, and then using that intelligence to classify what we know, predict what comes next, and identify abnormalities. This isn’t terribly different from our own neurons and synapses, which learn from incoming streams of signals, store that learning, and allow it to be used “forward” to make more intelligent decisions (or take actions). In the last 30 years, AI practitioners have built practical neural nets and other types of machine learning algorithms for various applications, but they are all bound today by the limitations of digital scale (an exponentially growing Web of interconnections is but one facet of scale) and speed.

Today’s digital computing infrastructure, based on switching digital bits, faces some big hurdles to keep up with Moore’s Law. Even if there are a couple of magnitudes of improvement yet to be squeezed out of the traditional digital design paradigm, there are inherent limits in power consumption, scale and speed. Whether we’re evolving artificial intelligence into humanoid robots or more practically scaling machine learning to ever-larger big data sets to better target the advertising budget, there simply isn’t enough raw power available to reach biological scale and density with traditional computing infrastructure.

RT @TruthinIT: There's no cost of goods like a traditional NAS device where I've got disks I've got to pay for. And if I'm not using the data on those disks, I still got to pay for those disks. bit.ly/2BBX073@Nasuni@smworldbigdata

In 30 min I'm interviewing @Cohesity (and customer) on @TruthinIT about Mass Data Fragmentation. It's about having too many copies in about four or five different "dimensions", including cloud! Join us webcast (12.11.18) @ 1pmET (and there will be prizes) bit.ly/2PdqrQn